Once Becky had told her, she too looked worried. What would Barnaby do now and would this mean that she could no longer care for her daughter? She couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from her and for the first time she watched the nursery door impatiently waiting for him to appear.

It was almost two hours later before he came, by which time Charlotte was fast asleep. Becky had cried non-stop ever since hearing the devastating news and Amber had sent her off to her room for an early night.

‘So what’s going to happen now?’ Amber said the second he set foot in the room. ‘To Charlotte, I mean?’

He crossed to a chair and sank heavily into it. ‘I’ve been trying to think of that,’ he said wearily. ‘And I do have a proposition to put to you but you may not be agreeable to it.’

‘Oh?’ Amber raised her eyebrow.

‘I shall be buying another property,’ he told her. ‘It will be nothing as grand as this one, of course. I shall start to look around for somewhere suitable immediately. And I thought . . . Well, I hoped that you might come to live there with us so that you could continue to care for Charlotte because I will have to work. The only trouble is you will be laying yourself wide open to yet more gossip. It’s bad enough as it is but imagine what people will say if they know you are living unchaperoned with me.’

‘People can say what they like about me,’ Amber said heatedly. ‘Just so long as I can be with my girl.’

Barnaby nodded before going on, ‘The other thing is I won’t be able to take on any staff. Not until I get another business properly up and running that is. So it would mean—’

‘It would mean I’d have to be head cook an’ bottle washer into the bargain,’ she finished for him. ‘But that’s all reet. I ain’t afraid o’ hard work.’

‘Even so, I’d like you to think about it before you make a final decision,’ he encouraged, before leaving the room, closing the door softly behind him.

*

Early the next morning Barnaby set off on his house-hunt but everything he looked at was either too expensive or so rundown that it was almost derelict.

‘Did you find anywhere suitable?’ Amber asked when he visited the nursery that evening and he shook his head.